


icing sugar

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bakery, Gen, I didn't post it until now, because I was afraid of being typecast, look it's a bakery AU okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 03:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightingale, Grant and May sounds like a law firm, Peter insists, but Lesley disagrees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	icing sugar

Nightingale, Grant and May sounds like a law firm, Peter insists, but Lesley disagrees.

“It’s classic!” she insists. “Listen to the man who is not now, but will one day, be a million years older than you.”

“Age before wisdom.” Nightingale smiles. “But surely, Peter, you acknowledge it has, um, a ring to it.”

Peter isn’t convinced until the sign painters have been and gone and it’s too late to object anyway, but he has to admit it looks good above the shop window in the flowing gilded script. And as he might have predicted, the people round about call it Nightingale’s – Nightingale’s the cake shop in between the grocer’s and the Buddhist centre – and that, Lesley does keep on saying, has just the right cadence, like Magnolia Bakery or something similarly artisanal.

“We’re not artisanal,” Peter says, sulkily. “We’re _good_.”

On that, at least, they are all agreed. They do tiny wedding cupcakes with delicate frosted patterns, they do children’s birthday party cakes featuring icing locomotives with in-built whistles, they do neon sheet cakes with glorious gore commemorating how _PUNK IS DEAD_. What they all have in common is light-as-air sponge and buttercream to die for. “You don’t need magic for this,” Nightingale cautions. “At least... not Newtonian magic.”

Peter’s seen copies of his, Lesley’s and Nightingale’s latest MRI scans, and appreciates that no, cake-making is not something for which you risk those soft dark shadows – but for Nightingale at least, sometimes magic comes easy as breathing, and he suspects something more than wire holds up the very best creations. And perhaps it is worth it, for the edible pot-of-gold suspended at the end of the marzipan rainbow all dangled above the greenest, tackiest St Patrick’s Day cake the world has ever seen.

Peter practises small _formae_ , in the back of the shop after night has fallen, while Lesley proofs tomorrow’s dough and Nightingale walks through the shop, closing up, carrying his own light. “Someone will see,” Lesley calls, but Nightingale smiles.

“For once I find I don’t mind,” he says, covered in glittering sugar, and Peter smiles back.


End file.
